Top Apps Made with Flutter – 17 Stories by Developers and Business Owners

Agnieszka MroczkowskaContent Marketing Manager

In this article, you’ll see the best Flutter app examples with key insights from 17 different app owners and developers who are actively working with the framework.

“Development in Flutter is a breeze“, “Cross-platform solutions have been around for a long time, but Flutter is the first one to do it right.”, “The biggest downsides to Flutter are platform risk, and size of the developers’ community”, “Our crash rates are down tenfold, and our users are happier than ever”.

What you’ve just read is only a handful of quotes from the seventeen stories of apps made with Flutter we’ve collected in this article.

Flutter – short introduction

On December 4, 2018, Google released Flutter 1.0. Check this video to watch the announcement from Tim Sneath.

What’s more, Google used the same event to launch Hummingbird – a new project focused on bringing Flutter apps to the web, running the same code whether in your browser or on your smartphone (it is in beta, for now).

Flutter is Google’s mobile app SDK. Complete with a framework, widgets and tools, Flutter gives developers an easy way to build and deploy fast, aesthetically-pleasing mobile apps – on both Android and iOS platforms – with as little overhead as possible.

Flutter is a hot topic, and it’s high time you found out if this emerging technology could improve your mobile app development process, reduce costs, maybe both.

Social Networking

KlasterMe

app for content discovering & creation

The app for creating, sharing, and discovering different forms of content from images to articles. A user can create a page to showcase their contents and get recognised in the community. The pilot web version of the app was released on December 2018, the Android version on January 1, 2019, and the iOS version on January 5, 2019.

Once you are past the steep learning curve Flutter almost works like magic. Abracadabra… there comes a navigation drawer. Hocus pocus…a hero animation. It is that easy and fun!

Flutter widgets made the development simple, productive and fast. Although third-party modules and components are not as large as in case of React Native, more than 90% of the widgets required for the first version of our app were available in Dart Pub. These widgets are so easily customisable that you can create effortlessly almost anything you can imagine.

What is more, Flutter has a really enthusiastic and helpful community around on Github, Stack Overflow, and Google groups. Also, I need to mention that they have insanely good documentation which made the on-boarding really, really easy.

The Hot Reload feature also helped to speed up the development process making it straightforward to experiment with the UI, and fix bugs in extremely short time.

If you are new to Dart and trying to learn Flutter it will consume more time than React Native. At the same time, if you have experience in Dart learning Flutter will be just a walk in a park.

The components in React Native are pretty basic so if you need anything extra, considerable effort is required in styling. Most of the time you have to use a different component for iOS and Android or style it differently. At the same time, for Flutter everything is a widget. Widgets are based on material design and most of them are adaptive so you can use the same widget for Android and iOS.

Speaking about performance, Flutter has really an upper hand over React Native as it is compiled to ARM or x86 native libraries, which makes it really fast whereas React Native is not compiled to native code and still has that javascript layer that makes it underperform compared to Flutter.

Flutter is the best mobile development framework I have come across so far.

FLUTTER VS REACT NATIVE

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Business-wise, one needs to understand that Flutter gives you a cross-platform solution for:

1. UX/UI – 100% shared between all platforms. Unlike React Native, which is a bridge to native UI elements.

2. Business logic, math, algorithms – 100% shared.

At the same time, anything that needs to talk to the operating system (e.g. getting phone contacts) cannot be shared and has to be developed separately for each system. Of course, many common plugins already exist. So, the bottom line is that most of the code is shared. Probably around 85% for Pairing.

The big difference from native development are the widgets introduced by Flutter. In other development frameworks, UI is defined by some xml-like language. Here, all UI is part of the code. I find it both more comfortable and flexible.

The fact that every scene is built from code gives you a very easy and elegant way to update the view based on the app’s state, incoming data, and user input. You don’t need to have an XML and hook it up in code then. It’s inherently hooked to your model. It’s completely REACTIVE.

It feels like the Flutter team took the good parts from native development, combined it with the good parts React-Native introduced and further developed it from there based on React Native’s lessons. So it feels like the crème de la crème of both solutions.

Another huge advantage of Flutter is the Instant Run. You change the code and it is immediately updated on your device. Without even a ‘flashing’ screen.

Yet another asset – Google’s support is not only for the framework but for itsecosystem: documentation, Github issues, and plugins (e.g. Firebase plugins, files, etc.).

Developing with Flutter really feels like native development does. The language is strong. The compiler catches errors. The IDE helps you to code, and – just like in the native – you get common views and UI elements.

If your app is specifically designed ONLY for Android or ONLY for iOS, and it needs many interactions with the operating system – you are probably better off with native development. In all other cases, we would go with Flutter.

To sum up, we are very satisfied with Flutter and believe that it is the future in mobile development. In fact, we are now working on migrating all our existing native apps to Flutter.

Meeve

Development in Flutter is a breeze. It’s so much faster than the native code. For businesses thinking of using Flutter – do it. It can reduce development costs by half, because Flutter makes it easy for devs to maintain the codebase for apps running on both iOS and Android.

Starting to write an app with Flutter can be a daunting task at first thought for a few reasons:

Dart. It is a new language which is hardly ever used in the industry, at least no one we knew ever used it for the web. One can admit – it’s kind of pain to learn new languages. But Dart is nicely designed, and anyone familiar with either Java, JS or even Kotlin can pick it up in a few hours with ease.

Coupled code. With Flutter you write code inside the layout you are designing. Since everything is pure Dart and nothing like JSX happening, everything is a widget and highly customisable, which starts to make a mess quite easily. It takes some time and a bunch of tries and errors to understand how to structure your code to keep it readable after 2 days.

It’s new. Anything new cannot be put into production just like that – and people are skeptical of Flutter too. There’s no need for this skepticism because despite Flutter being new it is quite stable for production use. We’ve faced only two types of crashes since the launch, and those were quickly fixed by the Flutter team. Overall, Flutter has been a great value for us. We definitely will be sticking to Flutter for the upcoming projects. We are working on one right now and eagerly wait for the hummingbird project to see the light of day to target Meeve for the web too.

n8

app for finding events

The app allows users to meet new people nearby by joining them in real life activities.

We see a lot of benefits that stem from using Flutter. Our team has two people, and only one actually codes, but this is more than enough for us to make the progress we needed, both for iOS and Android. We built PostMuse in a matter of months, including research. Considering this is a media editing app, we went to market in record time.

Developing in Flutter is simply magical – everything is nearly instant to reload, complex UIs get built in hours, and the code itself is very easy to read through and maintain. Anyone can write code that a machine understands, only good devs can write code that other devs can understand, and Flutter makes it easy to be a good dev from my experience.

The Flutter team made sure to make development fun, and this includes Dart as a language. Do I miss Kotlin? Yes, to be honest – but I hope to never go back to slow reloads, slow compiles and lots of boilerplate to go along with it.

I wrote a small app in React Native and can say that developing with was fairly fun, but when it comes to complex UI styling, nothing beats Flutter. And when I say nothing, I also mean the native Android and iOS frameworks. I think in some cases the Flutter implementation of Material Design was more on-point than the Android implementation for it. It really is that extensible and powerful, and playing with it for just a few days should make that obvious to anyone.

When is Flutter NOT a good choice? A good example can be any app with very little UI, or apps that have a lot of system integration to do. If you need a functionality and most of the work you will put in will be in Swift or Kotlin anyway, then you should probably just go native. Before you make that decision though, check out Dart Pub because there is a chance someone created a package with that OS-specific code.

Flutter still has a few things missing. A complete and reliable solution for in-app purchases has not emerged yet. If you are worried about this, don’t be – there are a few libraries that solve parts of in-app purchases and you can most likely get the job done. I think everyone wants an official, really good repo for in-app purchases, and the Flutter team is working on it.

If you start a new project, you should definitely consider Flutter. If you have problems, the community will be super helpful. I will definitely use Flutter in all my future projects.

Health & Fitness

Reflectly

mindfulness app

A personal mental health companion. Reflectly is a journal using artificial intelligence to help users structure and reflect upon their daily thoughts and problems.

Reflectly was started in January 2017. Fast forward to August 2017 – after an extensive period of user testing – we launched a MVP of Reflectly, built entirely in React Native.

We had a huge issue with the cross-platform compatibility of our UI between iOS and Android. It was actually so bad that we had to initially delay our Android release by 1.5 months to just get everything fixed.

We simply could not output our intended features fast enough, and that was slowing down our business immensely which was frustrating to say the least. So in January 2018, we started looking far and wide, where we came across Flutter.

As a former web and native app developer, getting started with Flutter was truly awesome. I know it’s been said before, but the huge power and productivity you get with instant stateful Hot Reload was mind-blowing to me.

In our case, from the first line of Flutter code that was written in March 2018, until we were finished with the entire app – including an entire redesign and adding a bunch of new features underway – it took only 2.5 months. This included both the learning curve of Dart as well as an entire rewrite from scratch for both frontend and backend – with 0% code reuse from our previous implementation.

Standing on the other side of the rewrite I can hands down say it was the best decision we’ve ever made for our platform. Not only are we able to maintain incredibly fast and extremely confident release cycles, but also we haven’t ONCE had to do a platform-specific implementation.

Our crash rates are down tenfold, and our users are happier than ever.

That being said, Flutter also has its natural shortcomings here and there. One of the biggest for me is the lacking support of being able to compile Apple Watch and tvOS apps out of the box. This requires Bitcode support which Flutter doesn’t have at this time.

So in summation – Flutter is extremely awesome. Soon we’ll be able to support a nearly 100% shared codebase across both mobile and web with Hummingbird being showcased later this year. On the other hand, you should also know your project limitations. Take a look at what your project requires and see if Flutter is a fit. If you do decide to give it a try, I can assure you won’t be disappointed.

Watermaniac

app for tracking drinking water

With Watermaniac users can track how much water they have drunk every day.

I had a feeling Flutter might be a big thing in the software industry, and I’m really pleased I trusted myself, and I do not regret a single minute I spent on learning Google’s Flutter.

As a developer, I really enjoyed writing an app in Flutter comparing to React Native which I gave a shot once and disliked it after a few hours. Creating simple and advanced UIs is so joyful I’m thinking about porting the same approach to Swift by creating a library for that.

Flutter is simple to learn so even if in your team there is no single developer specialized in it, the cost of getting training for the ones willing to learn Flutter should be quite low.

I’m not sure about the maintenance costs yet, though. It might seem to be lower in most scenarios, but if one day there is a big iOS/Android update that breaks half of the features we have implemented it might be devastating, especially if there is a lot of dependencies to plugins which authors might abandon. Either way, in my opinion, Flutter is a great choice for startups with a lower budget, although native iOS and Android apps should always perform better (if written correctly), so for apps where performance is critical, I would stick to native solutions.

Shopping

Xianyu, Alibaba

m-commerce app

Alibaba, the world’s biggest online commerce company, used Flutter to create a beautiful app experience for iOS and Android on their Xianyu app, which has 50M+ downloads. More than 10 millions users use this app every day.

We were immediately intrigued by Flutter possibilities when it comes to UX – including high FPS and smooth UI. But, above all, Flutter was an incredible time-saver. It allowed us to use a single codebase which makes the maintenance of our app much easier and faster.

Because of tens of millions of users we had, we could not build a new app from the very beginning, so we started implementing Flutter features incrementally, incorporating them with our apps. The ItemDetail page – the most crucial, complex and frequently visited section – is run through a single codebase on Android and iOS using Flutter.

On the other hand, we were encountering unprecedented challenges & difficulties, e.g. with Flutter SDK when it was still in beta, or with adding Flutter to existing native projects. We needed to provide a hybrid mode of Flutter and native and ensure supporting tools for efficient collaboration under this mode. We were the first one who did this. At the end of the day, thanks to solving all these problems our team grew up quickly, and thus we have contributed to the improvement of Flutter.

Using Dart and single code to implement pages was different from the old habits we used to have, but we fall in love with it as soon as we tried it out. What else can be more fascinating than seeing results right away while editing your code?

Yep, we like Hot Reload and Dart, which are so easy to get that the front-end developers would ask “Are you sure this is not a Client-side code? They look like Javascript + CSS, I mean even I would like to give it a go!”

HuYu

app for paid surveys & rewards

With HuYu app, users share their shopping data by scanning grocery receipts and giving their opinion in surveys. The data is anonymized for market research. In return, users receive points that can be redeemed for gift cards and vouchers.

Flutter played a key role in the HuYu project. We were amazed by the speed in which we got the app to market – it took 16 weeks.

Swav Kulinski

Lead Engineer at The App Business

One of the key changes we noticed was the interaction between developers and designers. Native apps tend to have a long design-develop cycle, and native UI toolkits are more time consuming to use. Specifically, modifying UI once implemented is much more difficult. However, this is no longer true with the help of Flutter.

The main benefit Flutter has over native and React Native is the lack of platform constraints. Flutter is not muzzled by platform UI because it doesn’t use it. It renders everything by itself. You are free to build the best UX without compromise. It is the main difference between Flutter and React Native. React Native delegates drawing to the platform.

This approach has a nice ‘perk’ which comes with owning its rendering pipeline. Native UI toolkits are quite fragmented because of the system versions. For example, Android has introduced many animation frameworks to the SDK over the years. As you try to support older system versions, you learn the hard way that it’s not easy to implement animations which work flawlessly on all versions. You have to degrade the user experience. Flutter doesn’t have this problem as it’s not dependant on the version of the system it’s run on.

Flutter shines the most in projects with very bespoke UI and demanding UX. This advantage will diminish if the focus of the app is not on how it feels and looks. Flutter communicates with the host system using channels. They require implementation in the platform-specific language. For everyday needs like Bluetooth, Camera or Google Maps you will find existing plugins, but for everything which cannot be found in the Dart libraries, you will have to implement your own plugin. Creating one or two integrations is not a massive effort, but when your project requires a dozen, then it might be just not worth it. So, complex integrations with the host platform may diminish the benefits of using Flutter.

We use Flutter currently, and our clients are more likely to hear about Flutter now. Launching 1.0 in December of 2018 was a huge contributor to this. And as we see major players like Alibaba using Flutter, the future looks promising.

Music

Topline

music recording app

The app lets artists record and save their song ideas wherever they are. It was showcased at Google I/O 2018 event. The solution has been recognised by the music industry thanks to distribution platforms like Spinnup or Ditto. “Music App of The Year” and “UX of the Year” at UK App Awards 2018. Designed & developed by Miquido.

Flutter improved and boosted our app’s development. The creation of the Topline MVP took Miquido ten weeks. Long working hours, extreme intellectual effort, facing unfamiliar issues – it was well worth it! We expand our knowledge immensely during the process.

When we started the development, Flutter SDK was in an experimental Alpha version – which means it wasn’t stable. Even though the design looks really simple, the app structure itself is very complicated. There were plenty of challenges involved, connected directly to the new technology. Fortunately, there were also plenty of cases that the Flutter team helped us solve.

A good point about Flutter is that it has a wide range of widgets which are ready to go, customizable and perform just like you expect them to: they are fast and pretty. One of the most revolutionary features that helped our developers improve faster is the Hot Reload – thanks to this solution, you can notice your mistakes much faster and correct them in the real time. Last but not least, Flutter helps you optimize and build an APK for your release, giving better performance and significantly reducing the file size.

To sum up, creating the app with Flutter was a challenge, but we made it, and we loved it! Flutter itself is showing great potential for implementing business logic for apps, writing UI and SDK’s. However, before it goes as a standard, development community need to appreciate the new SDK and transform it to business value.

Music Tutor

learn to read music app

With the app, users can learn to read sheet music and improve their sight-reading skills. It helps to develop speed and accuracy in reading sheet music by identifying music notes in timed sessions.

Thanks to Flutter I was able to bring out the product to the market quickly. I have plans to use this technology for a few of my upcoming projects.

The main drawback of Flutter is that it is widgets based, and not all low-level functions are available as widgets at this point. What is more, currently, there is no drag-and-drop based visual IDE for laying out the widgets. Its all through code as of now.

When it comes to pros of Flutter, it is relatively easy to develop and maintain an app with this technology, because of a single code base. Another advantage of Flutter is that apps made with this technology have native performance.

For my app, Flutter was a perfect choice. I was able to publish inKino within a couple of weeks, to both app stores, after only working on it in my free time after work.

The widgets and developer APIsthat Flutter provided were sane, well-thought, and predictable. There was no need for boilerplate code such as list adapters, and everything was nicely documented.

I also quite liked the fact that Dart had support for JIT and AOT builds, so I could Hot Reload and iterate faster on development mode, but still ship a natively-compiled and fast release build when it was time to publish the app.

The only disadvantage I really could think about at the time were that there were not that many resources or established guidelines on how to structure your Flutter apps. There were not bigger open source apps to learn from regarding testing, best practices, architecture, and folder organization either. I came up with a lot of solutions on my own.

I have to admit that at first I was skeptical about Flutter, mostly because of the language and the fact that it doesn’t use native widgets. However, with some training and a bit of effort, I quickly became more experienced in building screens. I was highly surprised about the performance and I also loved playing with animations.

Now I am able to build an app with Flutter faster than I would do with native solutions for a single platform. I will definitely use it for my future projects. I am also using it at work for developing prototypes. As a mobile developer I highly recommend Flutter. At least, give it a try.

EntrenaPro

app to finding trainers and sports centres

The app connects athletes with sports coaches and sports centers. It allows users to look for training in their area.

As a non-technical person, I perfectly remember the moment when we decided to choose Flutter evaluating the possibility of creating own components. It sounded risky but fascinating, so our wilder side won and we chose Flutter. We wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

I strongly recommend any junior developer to play and explore Flutter possibilities before beginning any huge project – even this process of learning can be really delightful.

From my perspective of Project Manager who is into UX Design, I am still missing more communication from the Flutter team to explain other colleagues (Product / UX designers) the numerous possibilities this framework has, and why it is worth to apply Flutter to some ideas (advantages in deploying time, good UI resources, etc.).

I think that new technology and frameworks should be introduced not only to developers community but also to the people who deal with both Design and IT roles every day, so also to visual professionals who should participate in choosing technology and tools.

Finance

Cryptomaniac Pro

cryptocurrencies signal app

The app gives users information about the most accurate cryptocurrency signals, news about cryptocurrency, the service record of the portfolio and more.

Creator of Cryptomaniac Pro, Mobile Developer at Eunomia International

I can tell everyone that Flutter is a really good choice, it saves a lots of time on development cycle, we could deliver our app to our client within less than 2 months which is 40% faster than development with native SDK as we did before, and certainly without sacrificing quality.

Some advantages of using Flutter that I did not get in other technologies are:

Speed in development

Performance that feels like native

Pixel perfect, we don’t need to worry about how Flutter appears on various devices

The security of the source code is maintained because the Dart code will be compiled into native binary

We have finished 4 apps published on Google Play store and we are currently building another app that will be released on March 2019, all of those apps are built with Flutter.

Education

School planner

app for students & teachers

Full-fledged homework management app for students and teachers. Allows users to add information about their timetable, homework, grades, exams, tests, enables sharing notes about them with other students, and set reminders.

I think every developer should at least take a look at Flutter. It is an excellent opportunity to build more reliable, fast, and beautiful apps. I am not good at designing but with Flutter it is simple.

I started working on the School planner app almost 3 years ago – first with Android Studio and Java, later with Kotlin. It worked well, but when I improved the app, things got more and more complicated. For example, it took around 3 minutes for Gradle to build with the restart of the application.

Last year in February I discovered Flutter and rewrote the app from scratch. I have to say it was the best decision I could have made. It is just amazing that I can reload the app in less than a second. But there are many other great advantages.

One of the biggest is the cross-platform aspect. I can release the same app with the same features to Android and iOS. This is very important for a social app like mine. The networking effect was huge and increased the popularity and downloads rate of the app. In a few weeks, I will reach the 50k downloads in the Play Store with a peak of over 4.000 active users daily. This is a milestone for me.

While Dart as a language itself might have seemed a step backward compared to Kotlin, I still like it way more than Typescript or even Javascript. Dart is simple and logical, and async programming is very intuitive with Futures and Streams. But features like Null-Safety would be very appreciated.

Maps and navigation

Station La Moins Chère

fuel price app

SLMC allows residents of France to quickly check the price of fuel nearby or near the city a user is searching. The app is available only in France.

Building the app with Flutter was a good choice for many reasons. I was able to deliver MVP much faster than I expected and I never had to worry about the performance and fluency of the app. It worked nice from the very beginning, even on budget phones. Debugging was simple, and the integration in Android Studio is nearly perfect.

If you are a React Native developer and hesitate to use Flutter, you should know that the most significant change you can expect is the lack of JSX (or I should say: DSX – for Dart). Dart is intuitive and easy to learn, so it won’t be an obstacle. I didn’t know this language before but after a few days of developing with Flutter, I already preferred Dart to JS.

In summary, I had a very positive experience with Flutter. As much as I like React Native, I will use Flutter for my next projects (if it’s not a game app).

Lifestyle

Pawfect Match

app for animals adoption

Another interesting Flutter app example is Pawfect Match – the app for matching users with homeless animals in their area (UK). It brings together adoptable pets from shelters across the country and gives them the best possible chance of finding their new homes.

Business

Google Ads App

advertising manager app

Another example of an app made with Flutter is the Google Ads app which helps its customers keep their ad campaigns running smoothly on the go. They can view campaign stats, update bids and budgets, get real-time alerts and notifications, call a Google expert or act on suggestions to improve their campaigns.

AppTree

enterprise app client

AppTree is an enterprise app client that enables you to use common business app functions such as labor entry, audits, data collection, inspections, requests, workflow and approvals with existing enterprise software data.

Last but not least insight from a Flutter expert

Before we sum up this article, we want to put some icing on the cake. We would like to share with you one final insight from an expert. He is the Founder and President at Very Good Ventures – company that developed a selection of Flutter apps – one being for Hamilton Musical.

David DeRemer

Founder & President at Very Good Ventures

Flutter is absolutely a choice that every CTO or mobile developer should be considering. It is particularly well suited for new apps (i.e., it’s not as good for integrating into existing app projects) that don’t require deep hardware or OS integrations.

First off, most users don’t know that a Flutter app is not fully native. Previous cross-platform frameworks didn’t feel native enough. Flutter’s renderer is very fast and it does not have the same limitations for performance or security that we feel plague other frameworks (looking at you, JavaScript).

Cross-platform solutions have been around for a long time, but Flutter is the first one to do it right. It is not perfect, but it is worth consideration alongside native for all new apps at this point. In our experience, when we compare the pros and cons of Flutter versus native, Flutter wins every time (except games and apps that require unsupported hardware integrations as a core feature).

Since we shipped our first Flutter app, we have only used Flutter ever since. Nobody on my team would rather write an Android app in Java or Kotlin at this point. In fact, they might threaten to quit if we forced them to do so. Flutter is actually fun for developers.

Consider that – not only do you get two apps, but you get it done faster and with a happier dev team. The recent announcement of Hummingbird and Flutter Desktop Embedding is a major game changer. In fact, we were able to run an existing Flutter app as a desktop Mac app with no code changes in about 10 minutes. That blew our team’s minds as they realised they are all now desktop Mac developers because of Flutter.

The biggest downsides to Flutter are a) platform risk, b) size of the developers’ community. While Flutter is an open source project, if Google decided to no longer support it, it would be catastrophic. The second issue is the size and experience of the developers’ community. The labor pool is just very small at the moment. Dart is not a very common language, so it doesn’t have the existing developer community that React Native has. On the other hand, the good news is that the community is growing exponentially.

Additionally, Flutter is still very early, and so there are occasionally some bumps in the road and bugs that we find in the framework. But those get fixed quickly, and it has grown leaps and bounds since we originally started working with it two years ago.

In summary, we think Flutter is the future.

Wrap up

As you can see, many of the experts we have interviewed believe that Flutter is the future of mobile app development. Not only can Flutter speed up the development process, but it can also reduce project costs.

That said…

If you want to develop an app with minimal UI

If your app is specifically designed for just one platform

Or if your app requires multiple interactions with an OS

Then, it is probably better you choose native app development.

Still, before you make any decisions, be sure to check Dart Pub as there’s a genuine possibility that someone, somewhere, created a custom package just for you – with your OS-specific code.

Since Flutter 1.0 is announced, it is worth to see by yourself whether it is a good solution for your projects. We hope that the stories in this article will help you come to the best conclusion. Good luck with your work!

Many thanks to all developers and business owners who contributed to this article.

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